Laurel Schiller
Environmental Ally
Editor's note: Laurel's story comes from Nicole Lavick, a local landscape gardener. Nicole interviewed Laurel and wrote this as her contribution to telling the stories of the sustainability movement in Sarasota County. Nicole chose this image of a magnolia blossom to represent plants you can find out at Laurel's nursery on Fruitville Road. Nicole is an entrepreneur herself and runs GardenSol, her own company and promotes the use of native plants.
Sarasota is geographically a rare location. Here, the land is unique to any other place on earth. Segments of soil have been defined, divided and privatized into precious property. The precious ecology is sought after as real estate and is, in our time, a lucrative enterprise.
Development defines progress and Sarasota's economy is activated. People are here to invest. Capital is allocated into loans obtained through the conveyance of property, a purchase of real property is made and the entrepreneur is leading in a competition of floating debt, accruing interest and timely payments. Real estate transactions are swiftly executed and involve complicated exchanges of sanctioned agreements that determine where money is to be placed and who is positioned at all ends; our economy and patterns of consumption thereof, are aspects of human society disassociated from the environment.
Within our lifetime, massive ecological alterations are evident and the rate of rampant development subjects the environment to irrevocable change resulting in the degradation of biodiversity. Just trying to exist in this social and economic continuum leads to human centric circumstances. It is an exemplary individual, who can model human centricity, at the periphery of the environment.
Laurel Schiller is an environmental ally. She moved to this coastal region to invest in the preservation of the region's ecology. Through education and politics, she proactively works to bridge the unobservant gap between flippant consumerism and chronic environmental impact. She advocates for green space in the urban environment, restores habitat and maintains public access to resources utilized in the restoration of hardwood hammock. For 2006, she coordinated the area's first homescape tour that featured native plants in a residential context. Continuously, Laurel conducts programs and seminars about Florida's ecology that effectively augment public awareness about the region's unique environment. Her initiative perpetuates ensuing issues at public forums. The issues consider many the possible, future outcomes of the coastal region's environmental character.
These educational events are Gardening for Wildlife and Edible Gardens. They place the person in a position of service of conservation of natural habitat through low maintenance and environmentally friendly landscapes. Such seminars mobilize community people: residents, business owners, government and academic officials, county and state parks, clubs, societies, centers, nurseries. Laurel's discussions empower community residents to assume a personal role in environmental preservation, allowing a knowledgeable participant to convert aspects of their consumerism into models of conservation. "We must all be stewards of the land and seek to save water, minimize energy costs and eliminate the use of fertilizers and pesticides." Laurel's effort is a personal investment in ecological responsibility.
Laurel Schiller is a co-owner of Florida Native Plants Inc, vice-president of the Association of Florida Native Nurseries and chairman of the State Education Committee for the Association. She is currently serving a four-year term on the Sarasota County Planning Commission. Laurel is a board member of the Sarasota County Park and Recreation Board and serves with the Environmentally Sensitive Lands Oversight Committee, Friends of Sarasota Trails and Friends of Oscar Scherer. She formerly was a member of the Sarasota County Tree Board, a Florida Garden Club National Landscape Design Critic and Master Gardener.
This is humanity for environmental conservation in the interest of humanity. Laurel Schiller is an organizer, educator, activist, leader, mother and partner. If sustainability in terms of ecology and development is defined as the preservation of an ecological balance by avoiding a depletion of natural resources, then her drive to replenish the region's ecological elements is sustainability personified.
